Belongings

It happens every day across the world, survivors are left with the possessions of a loved one who has passed away. And then what? Give everything away? Sell what you can? Donate? Recycle? Landfill? Keep it forever? How to deal with a lifetime of objects? What if sorting through those things revealed a person different from the one you knew? You can never ask them why they kept these secrets. Maybe there is no one left who can tell the story of what happened. All at once, you have learned something you didn’t know and can never now understand.

I made “Belongings” as a way to work through the posthumous mystery of my mother, who was deported by the Nazis as a Jew but owned a book called “Keep A True Lent” from 1953. Among her things, I found a silver filigree six pointed star necklace and a tiny statuette of a praying Mary she had kept by her bed. She was my closest relationship in life. I thought I knew her.

HOW TO ACCESS

You will need a VR ready PC and an HTC Vive/Pro/Pro 2, Oculus Rift/Rift S/Quest + Link or a Valve Index headset to access the experience on Viveport.

ABOUT THE CREATOR

Carol Silverman is a storyteller at the intersection of material culture and technology. Her work centers on the narrative power of objects. She believes that if we take a moment to listen, the worn, used, tactile things around us will tell us much about ourselves. Carol thinks of her day job as a decorator of sets for film and television as an object-based storytelling lab. She has had the opportunity to work with directors as diverse as Steve McQueen and Wes Craven among many others. Carol has decorated projects ranging from parody commercials for Saturday Night Live to feature film The Hoax, directed by Lasse Halstrõm and starring Richard Gere to the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, for which her set decoration team was recognized by the Television Academy with four Emmy Awards. Since becoming involved with the New York XR community in 2017, she has come to believe that virtual and augmented reality is the future of storytelling and looks forward to the day that spatial computing enters the mainstream. She received her MFA in Visual Narrative from the School of Visual Arts in New York this summer.

CREDITS

Director: Carol Silverman

Technical Advisor: Dario Laverde

Interactive VR documentary | Running time: 20 mins | Platform: Viveport | Compatible headsets: HTC Vive/Pro/Pro 2, Oculus Rift/Rift S/Quest + Link and Valve Index

Award nomination: Best Documentary Experience